Green Thumb
by AntipodeanOpaleye
Summary: “I killed it. It is dead because of me.” Movieverse.


**Title:** Green Thumb

**Author:** AntipodeanOpaleye

**Rating:** PG-13

**Disclaimer:** Everything you recognize from any other source either doesn't belong to me or is a purely coincidental occurrence. Anything that you've never seen probably belongs to me. I write for enjoyment and no copyright infringement is intended.

**Summary:** "I killed it. It is dead because of me." Movieverse.

**A/N:** Takes place sometime shortly after Pepper was hired. Just a snippet, adequately inspired by the prompt of 'green,' and my own poor, dying plants. Though not my bamboo. My bamboo looks good. For the **pepperony100** Prompt #6 – Green.

* * *

Normally, Mr. Stark wouldn't notice her approach before she wordlessly lowered the volume on his god-awfully-loud choice of music, even when he had beckoned her down to his lair in the first place. She had also noted that Mr. Stark had a distinct tendency to ask for her physical presence by some point within the third hour of her workday, between eight and nine o'clock, which very rarely failed if he was still in the mansion at that time, and sometimes managed to haunt even when he wasn't. However, it was approaching 11 A.M. by the time she was descending from Tony's personal quarters, and when she looked to the microwave in the kitchen and realized this fact, combined with the distinct lack of blaring dissonance from below, she knew something was amiss.

He didn't bother to look up when she tiptoed towards him, trying to eliminate the echoing click of her heels as best she could, but came to realize that it wouldn't have mattered if she'd stomped them into the pile of shattered glass that she'd gingerly stepped over next to his workstation, once she finally caught sight of his face.

He looked devastated as he stared vacantly at his desk, seeming to see straight through everything that stood upon it between himself and the wall beyond. His face was slack, the muscles in his cheeks lax and fluid, his eyes wide and his jaw loose, and Pepper felt the overwhelming urge to give him a hug just as he finally acknowledged her presence.

"I killed it."

"Sir?" she asked, peering over his shoulders and shifting her hips to get a better vantage point at the contents of his desk.

"I fucking killed it." The monotone of his voice was unnerving, countered by the solemnly endearing twitch of his lips as they deepened in a frown.

"Mr. Stark, I don't –"

"The plant, Miss Potts," he nodded stiffly toward a small terra-cotta pot filled with white-dotted soil, a shriveled, brown-edged shoot sticking up almost invisibly in the middle. "The plant. The dead plant."

"Yes, I can see –"

"I killed the plant. The plant is dead because of me."

Pepper shuffled closer, reaching out to dab her finger into the dirt. "Maybe it just needs some water."

"No, it doesn't need water," Tony snapped, tense for an instant before leaning back into his chair with a sigh. "I held it under the damn sink until it fucking overflowed. It doesn't need anymore godforsaken water."

Remembering her childhood, and having drowned a number of plants in her time, Pepper thumbed the leaves she could still manage to discern and tried to tell if the pathetic little sprout was salvageable. "Maybe it got too much water, Mr. Stark. What if we just, take some of the soil out, put it out in the sun for a while…"

"No," he cut her off, standing quickly, agitated, and striding to the opposite side of his desk. Crouching, he watched the plant from there, staring it down at eye-level as if he thought it was possible to glare it back to life. "No, Miss Potts. This plant is D.O.A." His voice dropped, and she thought, given the delicate sort of tone he adopted, that she probably was meant to have heard him lament that fact that, "It didn't even get flowers."

With a deep breath, Pepper tried to reason with him, gathering the tiny plant in her hand and considering it over the rims of her glasses. "I'm no botanist, sir; but for the record, I've never actually seen a bamboo plant in bloom."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Tony asked, incredulous, his eyes finally fixing on her for the first time since she'd descended the stairs. "That I'm a murderer amidst a population of bamboo-abusers for whom the poor plant refuses to bloom?"

She wanted to laugh. By _God_, she wanted to laugh. It took every ounce of willpower that she possessed to keep even a slight giggle from escaping her, but she managed. Willfully stifling a smirk, she replied promptly, "Point taken, Mr. Stark. Shall I order you a replacement?" Her newly minted Blackberry was already in her palm and ready to place the request at his convenience.

Tony glanced at her from where he was still kneeling against his desk, gazing longingly at the peach-colored pot balanced against her wrist. "No," he sighed, regret thick against his words. "I think that might be cruel, to subject another innocent specimen to my obvious ineptitude for gardening." His gaze sharpened for an instant, flicking up to her eyes. "Is there an agency for cruelty to plants? Like, the ASPCP or something?"

"Not to my knowledge. I think the closest you might get is the Sierra Club, and I've already sent them your donation for the year."

He nodded glumly. "Good. Now I can feel less guilty for letting the baby cousin of the mighty Redwood die a terrible death."

"Bamboo is actually native to Asia."

"Details, Potts," he rebutted with a groan as he sprung from his crouch, striding back towards his work area. "Details."

"Would you like to arrange it a proper burial service, sir? A memorial, perhaps?" she called after him, only half-playful before he returned his attention entirely to his work and she was wordlessly dismissed back up the stairs where she belonged.

He froze in mid-step, and Pepper wanted to dissolve into the concrete beneath her feet as the silence grew suffocating until Tony turned back to her, a sad smile on his face as he refused to meet her eyes, looking somewhere between her thighs and her knees. "No, Pepper. That won't be necessary. Everything dies, right?"

And suddenly they weren't talking about plants anymore.

Pepper had flown up the stairs by the time Tony had opened his project file, and she left that evening without so much as a goodbye, avoiding her boss as well as she could and asking Jarvis to inform him of her departure for the night. Yet, when Tony Stark woke the next morning and made his way down to the basement as he almost always did, he was surprised to find a small, white silk orchid in a wooden window box lining the far edge of his desk, between to the photograph of his father and his charging cell phone, with a bright pink Post-It attached to the leaves bearing only the words "Not everything" gleaming back at him in bold black letters, scrawled in a sharp, feminine hand.


End file.
